As an author you should never let others read your work until it is finished in book form. It is considered bad luck. If people read your work for free then there is no need to buy it. Just my opinion.

This debate has gone on for quite awhile here at HP. I see no upside to sharing a novel on HP before it is published. Others disagree. My main objection to it is having it stolen and published by someone else, a very real possibility. I would publish it as an ebook and be done with it.

Hubpages have a sort of copyright arrangement, on top of the intellectual property laws. I would be less concerned with someone "stealing it" than publishers not considering the work because the "first rights" had already been used here.

You can almost guarantee that chapters on HubPages will be stolen, because the rate of mindless theft from this site is very, very high. So even if you delete your chapters from HubPages, it's highly likely they'll still be published on spam sites.

Depends on what your goals are. If you just want a few people to have a look at it, then it's probably fine. You won't make much money and your readership is probably not going to grow very quickly compared to many other methods. If you aren't publishing for commercial reasons (money, recognition), there's nothing wrong with publishing a serial novel here.

My goal used to become an author Herban. Now I'm spending most of my time helping kids read and write so they can enjoy all the books in the world! I'm becoming frustrated because one work at least may be becoming "dated" with no audience.

I already have done, sort of. My ongoing 'HUNDING'S SAGA' is due to be continued to part 52. I might call it a day at part 55, it all depends on how I go about ending that in a way that lets it continue with the paperback 'RAVENFEAST' series. Don't want to give too much away do I? After all, I'd like a few more readers....

It's *really* difficult to pull that off successfully in this context and format. I've seen many people try and fail. They end up breaking their novel into a bunch of hubs, numbered in order, 1, 2, 3.. etc. The follow-through just isn't there most of the time. I would rather consider publishing an e-book and making a teaser hub to direct people to your book. Just my thoughts..

I published a novel here on HubPages. I want to publish my stories in many different venues so people who see my work here, for example, may decide to buy my novel on Amazon. I've also posted the first chapters of my two ebook novels on HubPages. The traditional model of publishing isn't the only one anymore. I like it to be an interactive process between me and my fans. I posted my first novel on Fictionpress.com, which is totally free, and didn't expect people to read it. But I got a wonderful response, and I learned a lot about writing structure. I learned that people like to read my works, and it gave me lots of confidence to go ahead with self-publishing. I like to connect with people here on HP. I think there should be more fiction writers here. It's always great to talk to other fiction writers, and it'd be wonderful to form a large community of them here. I don't see why not. Others have posted their novels here.

Internal readers (i.e. Hubbers) are prohibited from clicking on the ad links, so they are different from external readers. As far as I know, both internal readers and external readers can participate in quizzes and polls on the hub.

Most successful Hubbers get over 90% of their readers from the search engines - the active community on HubPages is actually very small and composed entirely of other writers.

If you think about it, the chances of anyone searching for your novel on Google or Bing or Yahoo is very, very small, so the chances of your chapters being read by anyone outside the HP community are low. That leaves just the community: if you interact with other members, comment on their Hubs and are active on the forums, you will attract their attention - but as I said, there aren't many of us, so you have to ask if the effort is worthwhile.

The other factor to consider is theft. Large article sites are targets for unscrupulous spammers, who "scrape" all the content from the site to fill their own websites. Usually those sites won't be successful - it's an old idea that used to work, but doesn't today. Unfortunately they don't always delete their content when they fail, so your Hubs end up scattered around foreign sites (especially in China or India) and you can't get them removed. That's not a huge issue if it's just a factual article - but if it's a creative work and you may want to offer it to a publisher one day, it's potentially a huge issue.

I know a poet who missed out on getting an anthology published because she could not get her poems removed from some sites.

It's very rare for posts on blogs to be stolen, so that option is much safer. However it can be difficult to attract readers to the blog. Alternatively, you could try publishing on Critiquecircle.com - you won't get general readership but you will get constructive criticism from fellow novelists. Or try publishing it in serial form on Smashwords.

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